


Little Purgatory

by chartreuseocean



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Sad, Sweet, wedding or no wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 10:19:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18547813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chartreuseocean/pseuds/chartreuseocean
Summary: Scene between the wedding talk dinner and the ring.His eyes… they light up, brighter than the sun at the end of a summer afternoon.Summer is a long way away, but his presence is warm.





	Little Purgatory

Just as the wind begins to moan, he bursts into the house, coat flapping about him, and the door swings shut with the force of the bluster. His hair is unkempt, and he’s disheveled from walking through the woods on the way back from the store, but his eyes… they light up, brighter than the sun at the end of a summer afternoon. 

Summer is a long way away, but his presence is warm, warmer than the blaze of the continuous fire under the watch of the Dark Lord’s cross. 

For a moment, she thinks “he’s home,” but corrects herself with a reprimand. This isn’t home; home is Hell, power, freedom, a heavy crown on my head. His home is with Mary, and I am not Mary. 

Nonetheless, as he carelessly tosses his coat onto a chair, and reaches for her, she wills her mind to forget everything else but the present. 

He takes her by the shoulders and chastely pecks her on the lips. 

“How was school today? Did the kids stir up any trouble?”

Before she can emerge from the stupor of her thoughts, he was already pouring glasses of red wine, red as the flowers he got for Valentine’s, all the way to the rim.

“Oh, it was… fine. The usual, you know.”

He hands her a glass. “You are so dedicated to the kids, Mary,” he says in his matter-of-fact way, as if this was a given truth. “They are so lucky to have you, to have someone who really cares.”

He disappears into the kitchen, a crumpling of bags and he starts preparing mushrooms he bought for dinner. The sound of the knife hitting the chopping board reverberates in her ears.

She’s still frozen to the spot when he first came in. 

Trays clank as he puts the pie in to bake, and the oven door snaps shut, sucking in the surrounding air.

“Mary, are you alright?” 

She unfreezes, spins to face him. He’s leaning against the frame of the kitchen door, a tea towel draped over his shoulder, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

His eyes hold untold depths; she sees concern lace the crinkles of his eyes, the slightest crease in the center of his forehead. 

“I’m… Nothing. I was just thinking.” It comes out breathless, in a heap. It surprises her.

“About our wedding?”

She doesn’t answer, and suddenly he is in front of her, tugging at her hands to sit down next to him on the couch. 

She gives in, her eyes looking down at his hands on hers, and she feels the urge to entwine their fingers so intricately until they became one unbreakable clasp.

He observes her for a moment. 

“Please, look at me.” 

And she does. His eyes are shining with a quiet, steady fire; it’s hard to tell if it was just a reflection of the real one blazing away noisily in the silence.

“We don’t have to get married. I know you said yes, but if you’re having second thoughts… I don’t want you to regret it. If, if marriage is like servitude, if marrying me means you can’t be independent, means you can’t be happy, then… I don’t want you to.” 

It is one breathless, adamant sentence, and he inhales deeply, as if it has drained him, hurt him beyond measure, taken every last ounce of him.

Now it’s his turn to look away. The resignation in his eyes becomes almost too much to bear, and she feels the air escaping the room, whistling through the infinite cracks in the window to the outside, leaving her throat uncomfortably tight.

She turns her hands over to grasp his in an iron grip, feeling them shake with inexplicable force.

His eyes dart up in surprise, and she finds, to her horror, that it is not only her hands which are shaking. Her whole body is trembling with a settling frost, clinging to her skin with a stubbornness.

“I want to be married,” she chokes out, with vehemence she had never felt before. “I want to be married to you.”

His gaze softens imperceptibly. He slowly frees his hands from hers, and reaches out to pull her in. She shakes her head, resists for a moment, but as she closes her eyes against the burning behind them, she surrenders and melts into him. 

He stills as her tears fall silently, thankful but terrified. Whatever could have happened? This Mary he returned to is more callous when she’s strong, and more fragile when she’s weak. 

She tries to suppress her tears, but they come in rivulets, light as rain. What was it about this man? I have been weak and vulnerable with him twice now. And yet… there is no fear, no shame, no games of humiliation. Mortals would say this is…

“My darling, my darling are you sure? Are you sure you’re alright? I don’t want to hurt you like he did. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If I did?”

She summons all her immortal strength, and kisses his jaw. “Don’t talk about him. I don’t care about him. You are nothing like him. You could never be anything like him.”

He nods, and lightly strokes her hair. In that moment, it was just the fire, the rapid, resonating beat of their finite hearts, and the low hum of the oven. 

After a long moment, he presses his lips to her temple, gentle as a stream skipping over stones rounded with age.

He lingers, and when at last he pulls away, her bones ache, and she wants, more than anything in the world, to return what he did not say with words. 

Instead, she promises to keep him safe. She promises to help him live. A mortal life like his is so much more precious than countless immortal ones. It means more to the world, means more than she’s willing to admit. 

The oven sounds and they both move to stand. He gives her a smile, one tinged with sadness and melancholy and hope and love, as if he knows her, truly knows her for who she really is. 

She almost breaks again, but then he vanishes with a flurry into the kitchen. 

How much longer can this go on? How much time is there together? She finds herself merely human, painfully aware of their fragile mortality. 

“Sit down, darling, let me serve you dinner.”

He emerges with pie, laughing at the upside-down cross she reoriented for the fifth time, and she forgets all the tragedy of their little world. 

She vows to let him keep the cross the other way up.


End file.
